By the end of this year, one new phrase would have been added to the English dictionary – or at least the urban dictionary. That is “the debt ceiling”. To the layman, it means nothing other than the ball that both Democrats and Republicans in the US legislative houses have been kicking around for the past few months. If anything in the news is to be believed, in a week’s time, the credit rating of the country will be permanently damaged from the country’s default on its financial obligations except this “ceiling” is raised.
Horrible as that prospect seems, it has become nothing but a means of political posturing and hostage-taking by elected representatives. On the one hand a party that wants nothing cut out of its special interest programs, on the other another party (and its activist arm) which is hell-bent on opposing any compromise that involves as much as a tiny concession on revenue increase. From afar, all this just seems mad. This is not what you’d expect from “adults in the room”. I listened to the president’s speech yesterday where he did his best to again articulate his ideas of the best solutions to the problem. I also saw the almost immediate rebuttal and posturing by the Speaker of the House. And in that little space of time, the country was back again to a countdown to (as The Daily Show calls it, Armadebtdon: the end of the world as we owe it.)
Unfortunately, there is nothing else exciting on television these days so we will watch with bated breath. What works for me especially while watching an important football match is to imagine the worst, and just enjoy the roller-coaster ride of crazy emotions. I’ll do that now, since politicians have chosen this option over good old common sense. In any case, we still will always have Netflix. Thank goodness for that.
Where I come from, there is no Halloween. We have masquerades. My last memorable trip to my grandfather’s village in Ogun state Nigeria was when I was barely a teenager. It was a festive period, and it always came with a carnival of masques, mostly manned by youths of around and a little above my age. Many of the masquerades there always went with whips and canes sometimes to scare, and sometimes as a ritual part of the carnival experience.
